You Are Dumb, which is not a blog, posts new columns when it can manage to in these troubled Trumpian times. It is also a Twitter feed, @youaredumb, with content in a similar vein but much shorter. For a take on what a blog by me would be like, check out OLDNERD.

March 29th

There are certain weeks out of the year that are more exhausting than others from an employment standpoint, and having just been through one such week, there’s a lot of bullshit I just don’t have the energy for. And, of course, all of it revolves around Trump, because all our lives inexorably revolve around Trump. SPASTIC TOPIC MONKEY FRIDAY!

As a middle-class white dude, I can take pretty much anything the Trump era dishes out short of drifting nuclear fallout from Iran and the Korean peninsula. But I don’t think I can take the media analysis of the Roseanne reboot and how it “gives a voice” to the Trump voter usually shit on by Hollywood. I just can’t. Y’all have that conversation without me. Because so far, the whole thing strikes me like white people responding to Black Panther the same way they say “when is there going to be a WHITE HISTORY MONTH?”

By all accounts, the show itself is good, which is fine. But the analysis of it is just the same retreaded equivalency between “economically anxious” white people, “Real Americans”, the “working class”, and Trump voters that got us into this clusterfuck in the first place. We’ve been humanizing, empathizing, and profiling “Trump voters” for a year and a half, trying to find some way to reach the conclusion that a whole bunch of people in this country are racist and stupid, and you know what? They’re still racist and stupid. Empathizing with them doesn’t make them capable of empathy, and they’re still passing around photoshopped images of Emma Gonzalez tearing up the Constitution while pundits talk about how Hollywood is finally giving them a fair shake courtesy of an insane woman harking back to her one real success. So you talk about it. I’ll be busy dry-heaving.

Not enough has been said about the fact that Donald Trump’s plan to tackle the opioid crisis is literally just to murder drug dealers and put ads around cartoons so that kids know opioids are bad, mmmkay? That’s it. That’s the plan. I was reminded of it because Trump gave an infrastructure speech today where his infrastructure plan was to tell everyone some vague highway he used to drive on sucks and he doesn’t know what a community college is.

I’ve said this before, but opioids are PRESCRIPTION DRUGS. Running a bunch of ads scaring kids away from prescription drugs would just create an entire generation of secular Christian Scientists. Nobody needs that shit. Oh, and if you think a single white drug dealer would ever get the death penalty under Trump’s plan, you probably think the Roseanne reboot is an accurate portrait of the economically anxious Forgotten Man that represents the real America. No, Trump’s death penalty is only intended for D-Money and Shifty, the two drug dealers Trump heard about from Maine’s governor.

In terms of how many soldiers the decision will kill, I don’t think this week’s White House staff shakeup holds a candle to last week’s John Bolton hiring. But Trump’s decision to replace VA Director David Shulkin with his presidential physician shows just how normalized the madness of Trumpland has become. Because under any other circumstances, what just happend is bugfuck insane.

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The President of the United States, angry because his Veterans’ Secretary was resisting his plans to privatize the VA, a move so stupid that everyone with any knowledge of the VA at all opposes it, announced on Twitter he would be firing the VA secretary and replacing him with a man whose sole qualifications are lying about Trump’s weight on his annual physical, testing Trump’s mental acumen by seeing if Trump could recognize a rhinoceros, and giving one good press conference. And, presumably, not opposing privatizing th VA, but who knows, because Trump is very bad at hiring people. Oh, and he announced the move on Twitter. And none of these things are surprising anymore. But man, are they crazy-ass wrong.